Desert Soldiers

The cover photo is the author’s grandmother Molly Plotkin and her good friend Dora Rosen, two Russian Jewish immigrant girls working in a garment factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about 1910 dreaming themselves as Americans.

Poetry about visionaries who survive hard times including jazz musicians Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Willie Nelson, and Frank Morgan as well as labor organizers in Guatemala and the United States such as Bessie Abramowitz in “Downtown Women” taking on the impossible. The book pays homage to the immigrants who built the first big women's trade unions in 1910; the refugees from Nazi Germany who rebuilt their lives after war's end; the survivors of the horror in Chile of the 1970s, Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s, and America's great jazz musicians. This poetry celebrates the “Winter Soldiers,” those who in every generation go through hard times to keep their visions alive.